Showing posts with label Marketing 101. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing 101. Show all posts

5.5.09

What It Takes To Be a Top Marketer

Procter & Gamble owes its 172-year history to fostering a culture of innovation and that means its legacy depends on risk-takers and innovators, albeit ones that work within a somewhat rigid corporate framework.
Tide has some $3.5 billion in annual sales, but growth is threatened by the economy—consumers are tempted to switch to cheaper laundry detergents. For the 52 weeks ending Jan. 25, Tide topped the liquid laundry detergent category with $1.3 billion in sales, but its other variants, such as Tide Simple Pleasures, fell 43 percent, or $36 million in sales, per IRI. Private label posted much bigger gains, up 23.4 percent in dollar sales, or $115 million, for the same period.

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27.4.09

Advertising Discipline and others

My reflections to an employment ad

Marketing Communications practitioners usually formulates own approaches on analyzing and developing advertising ideas
Personally, I learned to question and judge my approach as following:
Impact “Does it sell?”
Marketing is not entertainment business, even humor driven approaches aim to link brands with consumer mindsets emotionally.
Relevancy!
Is my communication strategy on core brand values? Does the expressive values share common ground? Is it relevant to my target group life style/ life stage?
Originality!
Is the idea familiar to my target group or sound odd? Has it been done before? Does it incorporate some or all of my brand essence? Is it going to employ brand advocates?
Touch point!
Is my brand having a dialogue with target group? Is it a positive brand activation and engagement on the long run? Do the brand in need to create its own medium at point of truth?
Traditional media Vs. New media
Complexity, mobility and fragmentation of any target group command brands to think out of the box in order to be differentiated specially on visibility, consumer promotions and below the line tactics that deliver on one single unique insight and relevant brand key proposition.

18.4.09

Online marketing glossary

"Above the fold"
Refers to banner ads that can be seen by the user without scrolling down the webpage. It's not a fixed line, though, because a user's monitor size and resolution can vary.
"Below the fold"

Refers to banner ads that can only be seen if a user scrolls down the webpage. It's not a fixed line, though, because a user's monitor size and resolution can vary.
Ad network

A company that aggregates available ad space across a large number of websites and sells it to the advertiser. There are many types of ad networks, from the very large to those targeted on a particular audience.
Ad server

A program that manages the delivery of ad banners for a web site or advertising network.
Ad space

The location on a webpage where a banner advertisement can be placed.
Ad Specs

See 'creative specs'.
Banner ad

A graphical advertisement that appears on a web page or email newsletter. When clicked, a user is brought to the advertiser's website.
Behavioral targeting

A strategy that determines which banner ad to show a user based on that user's observed behavior (such as the pages they've visited or searches they've made). By making the ad more relevant to the user, behavior targeting tries to improve the performance of that ad.
Click-through

When a user clicks on an advertisement and follows it through to the resulting webpage.
Contextual targeting

A strategy that determines which banner ad to show based on the content (text) on that webpage.
CPA (Cost per action)

Cost of advertising based on a user taking a particular action (such as a purchase, download, or sign up) in response to a banner ad.
CPC (Cost per click)

Cost of advertising based on the number of clicks your banner ad received.
CPM (Cost per thousand)

The cost associated with 1,000 views of your banner ad. For example, if a publisher charges a $10 CPM and there were 10,000 views, the cost of your ad is $100.
Creative specs

Guidelines for the type of advertising that a certain publisher will accept. For example, their ad specs might say they accept banner ads that are certain sizes or file types. adcherry helps make it easier for you to find creative specs by linking you directly to them (when they're available online) from our ad listings directory.
Creative

As a noun, refers to the actual banner advertisement.
Demographic targeting

A strategy that determines which banner ad to show a user based on attributes of the audience such as age, gender, income, etc.
Display ad

See 'banner ad'.
Frequency

The number of times a banner ad is shown to the same user in a single session or time period.
Geotargeting

Choosing what banner ad to show based on a user's location.
Impression

A measure of the number of times a banner ad is served to a users' web browsers.
Insertion order

A purchase order between the company buying ad space and the company selling it.
Inventory

The number of ads available for sale on a website.
Leaderboard

A wide banner ad often seen at the very top or bottom of a webpage. It measures 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall.
Rate card

A list of the prices of advertising available at a given website or ad network.
Reach

The total number of unique users who will be served a given banner ad.
Run of Network (RON)

When an ad network shows your banner ad across its network of websites based on what space is available. Usually less expensive than 'premium' ad space on those websites.
Run of Site (ROS)

When a website shows your banner ad across its entire site. Run of Site may be less expensive than choosing only to run your ad on a certain section of the website.
Skyscraper

A banner size that's tall and thin, often seen along the left or right hand side of a webpage. It could measure either 120x600 or 160x600 pixels.
Wide skyscraper

A tall banner ad that is 160 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall

13.4.09

Achieving Accountable Marketing: Six Critical Value Levers Must Be Pulled

By Michael Dunn
April 13, 2009 issue

Senior management continues to push marketers to demonstrate a strong return on investment, demanding more accountability and evidence that marketing investment is driving business growth.
It requires marketers to demonstrate disciplined planning, rigorous tracking and evaluation and, above all, continuous improvement in performance. They must also show cause and effect, quickly diagnose the root causes of any spending performance issues and make timely, fact-driven decisions to improve returns.


Call it accountable marketing performance, a goal that requires six “value levers” to be pulled effectively.

Value Lever #1 – Strategy
This critical lever sets up a series of choices that inform most of the subsequent activities across the other levers. It encompasses a series of decisions about strategic marketing choices:

  • With which set or sets of customers does your company have the best business opportunities?
  • What are the most achievable behavioral responses from these target groups?
  • What unique benefits, attributes and ideas are most likely to elicit the desired behavioral response?
  • What specific brand or business challenges are standing in the way?
Getting smart and shared answers to these questions requires a fact-based foundation involving customer segmentation and targeting, customer-driven analysis, pathway modeling, brand equity modeling and purchase funnel analysis. When combined with equally valid qualitative insights and intuitive thinking, you create a strategic value proposition that is worth its weight in gold.


Value Lever #2 – Content
The strategic foundation must be translated into compelling, engaging and medium-appropriate messaging ideas. The best content platforms originate from a magical combination of strategic insight and creative expression and connect in authentic yet emotionally compelling ways.
Most companies rely heavily on external agency partners at this lever. But it’s the best collaborative partnerships that inspire great work, and great content ideas can come from anywhere—agencies, similarly briefed internal teams pursuing independent and somewhat competitive paths, or single contributors who find inspiration on a walk or in the shower. Whatever the source, smart companies validate multiple messaging ideas with robust testing before deploying them across a full-scale creative campaign.

Value Lever #3 – Marketing Vehicles
Effective vehicle choices should enable your messages to reach and connect with audiences in a timely, relevant, cost-effective and multi-platform way. But you must understand where your audiences interact with media or media-enabled experiences as well as their openness to receiving messages in that setting. You must understand the optimal strategic applications of each vehicle, their trade-offs and the underlying economics.
The wrong choices can endanger accountable marketing. You risk failure by mismatching vehicles with marketing objectives or audiences, or by having inadequate coverage across the mix. It’s equally dangerous to fail to weigh the underlying economics and potential revenue response dynamics. Finally, balance between new and traditional media is a must.

Value Lever #4 – Investment Levels
This value lever should diagnose whether the overall marketing investment amount is too high or too low vis-à-vis the intrinsic financial return characteristics of the proposed marketing activities in relation to strategic marketing objectives. It also helps determine whether the amount invested in particular vehicles, programs or activities is too high, too low or just appropriate relative to intrinsic return characteristics and those of alternative investment options.
But it’s complicated. Marketing program returns are not static. Changes in brand maturity levels or competitive intensity can impact program-level returns. Changing media habits and changing cost dynamics of various vehicles can affect their returns. Nor are returns always linear. Despite such challenges, there’s considerable upside potential to this lever.

Value Lever #5 – In-Market Execution
Great content still needs a great delivery mechanism; execution diligence ensures that your marketing content and your delivery mechanisms work together harmoniously.
Many tactical decisions underpin a successful and cost-effective campaign. Planning requires choices about reach and frequency, geographic coverage, and scheduling in light of insights around seasonality, purchase frequency and key decision points in the purchase cycle across all types of programs. Buying necessitates hard choices in a fluid media landscape, encompassing financial parameters weighed against considerations like media reputation and specific audience demographics. The customer experience must be consistent and seamless. Be warned: if poor in-market execution prevails, your failures may well be amplified in an embarrassingly public way through Web-based channels.

Value Lever #6 – Fixed Cost Management
This lever aims for improved cost efficiency and effectiveness through both cost cutting and cost containment. Your fixed cost base depends on your mix of marketing programs and can account for 20 percent to 60 percent of the overall marketing budget. And savings can be redeployed into programs that may improve overall effectiveness.

This value lever requires applying a purchasing or procurement manager mindset. One way to start is by understanding the ratio of “working” to “non-working” spend on the fixed costs of marketing program production. If this ratio is off, try selectively applying strategic sourcing principles to pay a little less for what you buy, redefine some core programs so they can be executed more cost-effectively or re-engineer overall processes to reduce costs without compromising quality.

Accountable marketing performance is an achievable goal. By focusing on and unlocking the power of the six critical value levers, the marketing organization will prove its value to the business as a whole as the creative yet rational source of future growth.

Michael Dunn is Chairman and CEO of Prophet (www.prophet.com), a global consultancy that helps senior management more effectively use branding, marketing, design and innovation to drive profitable growth. This article is based his new book, The Marketing Accountability Imperative: Driving Superior Returns On Marketing Investments. He can be reached at mdunn@prophet.com.

11.4.09

Marketing: the unappreciated workhorse

Philip Kotler
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

The venerable Peter Drucker was an early fan of the new field of marketing. He struggled to explain it as a customer-centred discipline involving value creation. He wanted so much to disengage it from its confusion with selling that he penned the challenging statement: 'The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.'

Yet Peter Drucker's view of the role and importance of marketing still needs to penetrate the thinking of companies and the public at large. We need to seriously address the following questions:

How is marketing seen by various publics?
What is marketing's real role?
What can marketing do to gain a better public understanding, image and influence?

HOW IS MARKETING SEEN BY VARIOUS PUBLICS?

Every profession has its critics. Physicians and educators are not immune from criticism even though most people see them as strong contributors to others and to the public good. As for lawyers, their critics are too numerous to count. And sales and marketing people receive a continuous barrage of criticism.

Let's examine how marketing and marketers are typically viewed by the following five key parties:

  • sales force
  • chief financial officers (CFOs)
  • chief manufacturing officers (CMOs)
  • chief executive officers (CEOs)
  • the public.
Sales Force View
It may seem odd to state that the sales force itself has major misgivings about marketing. We thought that marketing and the sales force work as allies to help garner as many orders as possible. But sales people are among the first to criticise marketers.

  • Marketers spend too much money on advertising that we could use better to strengthen our sales force.
  • Marketer's ads don't impress us, nor do many of their brochures and collateral material.
  • Marketers set prices too high, making it harder for us to sell.
  • Marketers don't understand customers like we do.
  • Marketers don't add product features and services that will help us clinch orders.
Three of us took up the challenge and co-authored a Harvard Business Review article, 'Ending the war between sales and marketing'1, where we examined the causes and the cures of this problematic relationship.


Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
A company's chief financial officer typically views marketing budgets with scepticism. The CFO sees marketing as asking for a lot of money but rarely accounting for its ROI. The CFO expects ROI estimates from other departments such as when manufacturing wants to buy a new piece of capital equipment or when the purchasing department decides on new materials. But marketing acts as if it is exempt from this responsibility.
Yet marketing is not alone: R&D and human resource departments don't provide ROI estimates for their proposals. Why should marketing be singled out? But it is true that marketing needs to start doing a better job of estimating and documenting the financial impact of its campaigns.

Chief Manufacturing Officer (CMO)
The manufacturing group has a lot of complaints about marketing. Marketers want to put too many 'bells and whistles' on products that only add to manufacturing expense. Marketing runs frequent promotions that require adding another production shift to prepare a larger volume, only to be followed by a subsequent cut in production. Marketers push for special short production runs to customise some of their offerings. All this increases the costs of manufacture.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Many CEOs see marketing as largely a cost instead of an investment and a profit contributor. They see marketing as spending a lot of money with little short-run return. They read research reports filled with words and numbers that convey little customer insight or original thinking. They approve large expenditures on advertising campaigns and yet their acquaintances don't remember seeing the ads or remembering the message. CEOs want harder marketing evidence that marketing has increased sales, and yet all they get are measures of increased consumer awareness and knowledge. No wonder companies often replace the chief marketing officer every two years or cut the marketing budget as soon as the economy shows signs of slowing down. Rarely are marketing vice presidents active participants in senior management strategy decisions.

The Public
The public has an uneasy feeling about marketing. People remember the Vance Packard diatribe against marketing in his The Hidden Persuaders. There is a widespread feeling that marketers manipulate us into buying products that we don't need or even initially want. Marketers are seen as planning product obsolescence so that we get dissatisfied with yesterday's computer or camera and have to buy a newer model. Marketers keep interrupting us with unwanted and irrelevant commercials everywhere we turn. Marketers don't care if the product is good or bad for us, only if it is sold. The society ends up with overconsumption, high credit debt, material waste and a deteriorating environment.

WHAT IS MARKETING'S REAL ROLE?
All these critics have a love/hate relationship with marketing. They have a vague understanding that marketing is somehow necessary, somehow inevitable, somehow bad and somehow good.
I will describe four positive roles that marketing plays in society.

First, marketing has helped give birth to and gain acceptance of new products, many of which have eased or enriched people's lives. The housewife no longer has to work for hours in the kitchen preparing food and afterwards washing dishes by hand. She has a modern refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer; few homemakers would accept being without them. These appliances have emancipated women. And today's students have a computer, printer, scanner, camera, iPod, a PDA and a cell phone, none of which they would give up. Some of these new products were resisted at first, but thanks to marketing and sales efforts, they soon gained broad acceptance and use by the public, without any regrets.
Second, marketing is a powerful force for improving existing products. Products draw competition. Marketers have to fight clones by differentiating and improving their offerings. A company's marketers constantly search for ways to make the company's offerings different and better so they will be preferred in the marketplace. The pressure to compete through differentiation leads to continuous improvements of product and service offerings.
Third, marketing helps create and sustain jobs. We are not talking about marketing jobs, although they are also created. We are talking about all jobs. Jobs exist to create goods and services. When the public doesn't buy these goods or services, these jobs vanish. When marketers successfully push the sale of products and services, they are sustaining employment. The intense marketing of credit and goods and services plays a key role in creating a dynamic and growing economy.
Fourth, marketing, or effective marketing, improves the bottom line for most companies. In spite of the difficulty of measuring many types of marketing investments, we have to assume that most CEOs acknowledge that marketing contributes to their profits. If they felt otherwise, they would reduce or eliminate the marketing department and budget. There is no reason to sustain marketing in so many companies if it doesn't contribute to the top line and the bottom line.

CHANGING THE UNFLATTERING PERCEPTION OF MARKETING
Marketing can improve its image in different groups by taking four steps.
First, marketers need to improve their metrics and measurement of the financial impact of their marketing activities and campaigns. Senior management is losing patience with marketing over the lack of marketing results measurement.

The good news is that several people in academia and business are working on this problem and proposing new tools and solutions.
Second, marketing may need to prepare an educational campaign to inform the public about what marketing is, why it does what it does, and how this contributes to the lives of individuals and to the body politic. Too many people see only the tip of the marketing iceberg, namely TV and other ads, and wrongly identify it with the whole of marketing. They don't know anything about the research, product development, distribution planning, and other marketing activities that go into creating, communicating and distributing attractive products and services. I can imagine one page ads carrying the headline 'What is Marketing? Does it Contribute?' with text answering a set of brief questions about marketing. Beyond this, I would like to see a course in marketing or market economics introduced in high schools. This has already been proposed in Holland.
Third, marketers must build better working relations with their colleagues in the other departments of the company. Marketers must explain their role and how their actions support the other departments and the company's overall performance.
Fourth, marketers must publicize their work in social marketing and place marketing. Persons should become aware that many highly regarded social causes (anti-smoking, say no to drugs, exercise regularly, eat healthier foods) are helped considerably by social marketing research and messages. And many places that lack enough tourists and businesses are helped by place marketing campaigns using the latest marketing thinking and practice.

Clearly these are only first steps in a sustained campaign to bring members of the public and businesses to understand and recognize the contributions that marketing makes to individuals, communities, and the economy as a whole.

REFERENCES
1. Kotler, P., Rackham, N. and Krishnaswami, S. (2006) 'Ending the war between sales and marketing', Harvard Business Review, July.

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